Stop Living in Hell
I help people survive living in hell.
Some examples of hell, I have helped people cope with include:
A high level corporate leader who is stuck in a senior position and has to bow to less intelligent and less informed senior leaders. Listening to their nonsense statements and nodding in agreement, hurts his/her head.
A woman with three young children living with a man who is physically and emotionally abusive. Afraid to leave them alone and afraid to leave him because of the financial difficulties.
A single man caring for an aging father while managing his work and home. Lonely nights of sitting with a man with dementia, worried that one day that would be him and he would not have a son to hold his hand then.
A wife whose husband turned quickly from Prince Charming to a bully. Withdrawing attention, sex and financial support. Silenced by shame and not able to reach out for help because no one would believe her.
A poor struggling international non English speaking student who worked 3 jobs and takes 5 classes to make ends meet. Surrounded by classmates whose academic parents help them edit their essays while footing all bills, so they can just focused on those As.
A visionary startup leader who is worried he/she cannot make the next payroll for the staff while presenting a confident face to potential investors all on less than 3 hours of sleep over the last 5 days of pre-launch.
Can you relate to any of these stories?
We all live in Hells.
To help yourself or someone else survive Hells These are some psycho-spiritual principles that I adhere and coach my clients to which definitely ease or remove the pain
All Hells are the Same
And the first thing an enlightened heart and mind must reconcile is that there is no comparison of Hells. All hells are equal. The rich well fed depressed millionaire has the same hell as the poor yet happy child on the streets who runs home to someone who loves him, regardless of his stink. There is no worse or better hell. When a person is plagued with pain from their thoughts and feelings around a condition they are in, its the same level of hell.
There are some people who go so far to judge their own pain and their hell as less intense or less important than others’ hells. This gives them a double hell of having their own hell and then the guilt of feeling bad over something that is less intense than someone else.
Please do not over empathize or under empathize with a person’s hell. Accept that they are in pain and not judge or critique their pain. Pain is pain. Hell is Hell.
Have Gratitude in the least hellish moments
In times of hell, there seems to be no reprieve.
The moments, when you are free from the work bully or personal bully are the moments for you to stay in that present moment. They may seem so scarce and fleeting that it takes great discipline to feel into them. The redeeming grace to any hell is treasuring the non-hell and retaining in memory.
Like being in the desert with no water, every sip can be a cause for rejoice or a cause of pain. Rejoicing means you realize that the Hell can break. Pain is because in the moment of receiving we cannot fully receive because we allow the Hell mentality we carry to steal even this moment away.
We second guess the help that comes along the way, we complain about how little we receive, we turn the moments of freedom away because their sweetness make us feel again and most of us numb or shut down as that is how we deal with Hell.
Giving up our gratitude and our happiness to Hell is when we throw in the towel and we are at a loss. Surviving and claiming each moment is the best way to heaven again. One of my favorite movies and a must-watch is “Life is Beautiful”. A Nazi prison camp cannot chain the human soul. Only we can do that extreme spiritual violence to ourselves.
Breathe Deeply when in Hell
We actually stop breathing when we are in fear and in pain. Breathing helps regulate our heart beat and also calms us down. Hellish days and nights put us on edge. We are hyper sensitive and this makes it hard for our body to get the full rest it needs to recover. That’s why when people go through life challenges they end up looking like ‘sh**” Emotions can wear us down. Breathing deeper and focusing on the breathing helps us to regain our physical and emotional balance. Hell can occur in our backyard but we have a lovely shield around us because we breathe.
Being in the hospital for months on end watching a mother struggle for life, I used aromatherapy oils to breathe in to mask the medicinal and death smells around me. With each breath, I claimed my sanity again. With each breath, I claimed my body’s brief rest.
Emotionally Cope rather than Problem Solve
Too many of us want to make things better by fixing the external circumstances. We are well learning that we cannot stop hurricanes or terrorists or locate missing airplanes that easily. So we go into the other extreme and feel helpless and hopeless.
We cannot as yet make our horrible bosses, spouses, siblings, friends and neighbours disappear. We can however practice managing the anger, frustration and pain of living with a horrible person.
Most of the time, I sit, listen to the person go on and on and on about their terrible other half or tormentor and then I break their cycle of though by asking them how are they in that exact moment. In that moment sitting with me away from the challenges, they should find a semblance of peace or clarity. Emotions can be riled up any time we remember the injustices we are facing. However emotions need to be coped with rather than fanned into a fuller existence.
Until the time, the problem is solved, the emotions can be the true hell. We still eat, sleep and continue living. So we can do your daily life with less intense emotions if we cope with them. If we find ourselves living with a tinge of unhappiness running through our lives, we are the ones depriving ourselves of our inner peace not the tormentor. The tormentor torments in the daily existence. The inner thoughts daily of the tormentor is ours to create and to reduce.
Stare Hell in the Face and Laugh
Laughter is the best form of medicine was the title of my favorite section in Reader’s Digest. There were jokes and life commentaries that made me smile and laugh. Many people under extreme stress like surgeons in the operating theatre, soldiers in the trenches, startup leaders make inside tasteless jokes at times which states the obvious painful truth of their situations, but allows a laugh where there is none.
Black humor is a form of humor that regards human suffering as absurd rather than pitiable, or that considers human existence as ironic and pointless but somehow comic. This has been a coping mechanism for so many for so long. When we stare at our pain and manage to smile. We win. Twisted? Or enlightened? Enlightened because we can see ourselves as an actor in the play of life rather than the center of the universe. We are no longer the victim. We are in life and life has challenges.
There is Zen story of how a wise monk told a grieving mother who wanted answers to the loss of her son, to go to each home in the country and find a family which didn’t have a loss. She came back knowing loss is universal.
To reach a philosophical and existential detachment that we all experience hell and so we should laugh and smile not despite our personal hells but rather inspite of it. There is more great life than hell and most of life can be seen as “hell-ish”, and so laugh, laugh, laugh away.
Play the Game Survivor
You know how we love watching the reality show Survivor? We love seeing how average people find a way to get what they want despite their challenges. We love seeing them survive and in fact they learn new skills and also thrive –some earn a great following and also make big bucks later or as a winner.
We are playing the survivor game in our own lives. If we celebrated the resourcesfulness and ingenuity and calling froth our best selves during times of crisis, we may find Hell more fun. After so many instances of near professional and social near-deaths and deaths; when I sense another crisis coming my direction, I realize its time to stop trying to get things the way I normally would. I think of resources I can gather and almost prepare for the storm.
I find over the years that I gain confidence that I will ride the Hell out. I can survive. Make it a game in being resourceful, emotionally more stable, or simply a new way to live for a bit. Like the reality show, we know it is a phase even if it goes on for years and seems that it will never end. “This too shall pass” is the adage we need to repeat in every Hellish event we face. If the Hellish event lasts, how about this extreme of hell will pass, it cannot last that long. We are made to be survivors. Survive and celebrate the survival.
I wouldn’t wish a hell on anyone. However we are always in heaven or hell — simply because of a hurricane, a political party or person who is unjust or simply because your lover didn’t text you in the last hour. But in my coaching leaders and peak performers and basically all people in general we know, some hell actually does one good. Shaking our world up and making us appreciate the everyday goodstuff more and realizing that we can all truly survive living in any hell.
Want to have a chat with me around your nightmares and hell-ish moments and turn them instead into High Performance?
I am helping to pay for the costs of running Keep It Simple, a conference for Global Doers with a Positive Impact. If you want to work with me for 45 minutes where I can help crystalize your dreams with you. Buy a ticket https://www.eventbrite.com/e/connecting-doers-with-opportunity-tickets-36949705564 using the code CONNECT2017 by Oct 3. I will get back to you shortly with some coaching times.
